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With uncertain demands and quick shifts in customer needs caused by the pandemic, the manufacturing sector is undergoing a significant change.
By stepping into a new dynamic phase, it is offering substantial new opportunities and challenges for businesses in terms of operational visibility, business continuity, remote work, and the list goes on.
Amid this evolution, relying on old responses to the new and modern manufacturing environment is unlikely to suffice the advanced market needs.
So, what measures is your business taking to align with the shifts in the manufacturing world?
If you are planning to opt for some advanced solutions that help your business stay on top of the competition, look no further because Microsoft Dynamics Manufacturing has got all your needs covered with its comprehensive solutions. It offers advanced software solutions that help you embrace ever-changing market conditions.
What makes Dynamics Manufacturing your go-to solution is its all-in-one platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 which combines ERP and CRM and flexibly integrates with your existing systems, including BI or other Microsoft products.
That’s all about Dynamics Manufacturing.
Now, let’s break down the terms Dynamics ERP, CRM, and BI to explicitly understand how each option covers your specific manufacturing needs:
What Is Dynamics Manufacturing ERP?
Dynamics Manufacturing ERP is an enterprise resource planning software that helps you manage your manufacturing-related operations. It is a business process management solution that integrates multiple other systems such as supply chain, commerce, reporting, manufacturing, and more.
By combining all different processes in a single fluid system, ERP connects enterprise-wide data systems to draw better insights. It offers you the flexibility to adopt technology and fulfill your customer needs by improving business communication and accessing real-time data.
Serving as a bridging gap across your enterprise, Dynamics ERP establishes a connection between your front-end and back-end office. It gives you the flexibility to adapt the capabilities you need to address the most pressing needs of your business.
With its process automation features, it can automate your daily business operations such as planning, storing, costing, and routing to reduce waste and improve margins.
Dynamics Manufacturing ERP includes the following modules:
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations
- Microsoft Dynamics Business Central
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations
- Microsoft Dynamics GP
Why Is Dynamics Manufacturing ERP Critical For Your Business?
While some software fail to go beyond everyday business operations, Dynamics Manufacturing ERP supports your business growth and keeps up with your needs as you expand.
Though there is no all-inclusive software for all business needs, ERP is evolving into a better solution to bring processes together.
It helps your systems, processes, and data achieve connectivity to equip you with intelligence, speed, and adaptability to start optimizing your business operations.
Dynamics ERP can improve your business in three ways:
- Increases operational impact
Dynamics ERP connects your manufacturing processes and data, giving more accessibility and flexibility to your employees to take quick actions and deliver value across the enterprise.
- Drives optimal performance
With ERP and its integrated artificial intelligence (AI), you can access valuable insights that accelerate your decision-making and unveil ways to drive optimal performance.
- Ensures business agility
Dynamics ERP is built to adapt to your business needs and grow with you. It prepares you proactively to readily respond to any market change.
By covering various core functions of your business, Dynamics ERP aids in cost management and business expansion, strengthening your business to grow on a global scale.
What Is Dynamics Manufacturing CRM?
Dynamics CRM is an integrated customer relationship management solution in Dynamics 365. It helps you manage and maintain customer relationships enabling smooth interactions with customers.
It provides your employees practical tools to improve business relationships, be more productive, and win more business. By enabling complex technology integration to drive revenues and deploy modern solutions for manufacturing at scale, CRM helps you deliver better outcomes.
Dynamics CRM helps you boost productivity across the board by providing the following key advantages:
- Gives you deeper insights into opportunities, employee performance, and customer relationships
- Streamlines sales and marketing operations
- Offers intuitive interface with better user adoption
- Provides powerful built-in tools
- Ensures commitment to the product and offers partner support
Why Do You Need Dynamics Manufacturing CRM?
Dynamics Manufacturing CRM smoothly integrates with other enterprise systems and helps you deliver the most related products or services that your customers look for. It offers you plenty of advantages. Some of which are listed below:
360-degree customer view
By providing you with valuable chunks of customer data, CRM gives you the ability to take a deeper look at customer needs, understand them better, and enable market insight and innovation.
Optimum customer service
Ensuring the best customer experiences must be on top of the priority list of your business. Since a smooth customer journey is a key to more sales and brand loyalty, CRM helps you design offers that move your consumers through the sales funnel with utmost ease. It also keeps an integrated issue tracking system in place to track, update, and resolve product issues in time.
Accurate sales projection
Forecasting future market demands is the hardest job for decision-makers. However, with Dynamics CRM, you can do it smartly.
It keeps track of every order from order placement until delivery. By understanding the buying patterns of your consumers, CRM also identifies peaks and downtimes of their purchases.
With the help of such insightful data, it enables you to discover long-term trends and generate accurate sales projections that you can use for future planning.
Efficient supply chain
Having complex processes can lead businesses to high costs and inefficient implementations, resulting in a drastic effect on their desired return on investment (ROI).
To reduce complexity in your business, you must implement Dynamics CRM properly in your enterprise to get visibility into the entire manufacturing process- from inventory management, order processing, and warehousing to vehicle fleets and distribution chains.
Dynamics CRM also helps you streamline the supply chain to manage material supply, direct production schedules, and move products swiftly from the production site to the market.
Intelligent production planning
Smart selling is aligned with intelligent production planning. The enterprises that do not keep track of customer preferences may plan random production which is a screw-up in the growing business world.
Luckily, Manufacturing CRM is there to help you accurately anticipate required capacity by using historical data about past orders and production. It lets you plan production smartly and supports budgeting as well.
What Is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based Business Intelligence tool that facilitates creating reports, dashboards, and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
It goes a step ahead of Dynamics CRM and offers AI-powered answers to critical business questions. The dashboards BI provides you are for more complex and context-based environments that reveal real-time marketing, sales, or customer service trends.
Power BI easily integrates with Dynamics 365 through Power BI Connector and lets you combine its dashboards and reports with D365 to sync data between them. By consolidating data across different platforms, it allows you to create reports that visualize how your business is doing in the market.
Power Business Intelligence tool offers many other benefits for your manufacturing business such as:
- Built-in artificial intelligence user environment
- Real-time performance metrics for proactive insights
- The right tools for your teams to move from data to decisions in no time
- Utilizing standardized data security, BI keeps your teams connected from anywhere
How Can Microsoft Power BI Help Your Business?
It is a well-known fact that manufacturing is versatile and covers various processes which consume a lot of time to analyze. If an analytical error occurs, it can significantly slow down your decision-making, directly affecting your business profitability and efficiency.
To avoid that collapse, you must use analytical tools like Microsoft Power BI to control all production stages. Employing this tool for manufacturing helps your business decrease the analysis time.
It simplifies data analysis for electro mechanics and electronics equipment manufacturers through quality checks to understand data and take proactive measures to reduce internal inefficiencies and claims-related costs.
Power BI helps solve some of the most common manufacturing issues such as:
Production efficiency
Allowing you to monitor the efficiency of production processes, Power BI helps you keep an eye on quality and cost and identify bottlenecks beforehand to resolve them promptly.
Return of investment
With BI, you can analyze metrics of various spheres such as sales inventory, profit and loss, assets, and many others.
You can also generate detailed reports on any single selected department as well as get a comprehensive analysis of cost-benefit. This data helps you discover new ways to generate more revenue and save costs.
Track campaign performance
With BI’s advanced analytics based on marketing, sales, and service data, you can analyze consumer behavior, improve the performance of campaigns, and quickly respond to changes in the competitive market.
By entrusting data analysis to Power BI, you can spend your spare time trying new advertising strategies to get more customers.
Employee efficiency
Integrating Power BI with Dynamics allows you to analyze the production process and assess the efficiency of your employees. You can even set KPIs for your teams, perform plan-fact analysis of an employee, department, or period, and plan product release separately for each department.
Why Use Microsoft Dynamics 365 For Manufacturing?
Being a manufacturer, you must dream of a solution that combines ERP and CRM solutions into a single system. Microsoft Dynamics 365 makes that dream a reality by combining ERP and CRM into an integrated system.
Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based system that offers you a full suite of tools to streamline communication. It also facilitates easy integration with Microsoft Power BI.
D365 is not just a software system but a product line that is constantly updating its functionalities to meet the needs of customer service, sales, and marketing teams.
What makes Dynamics 365 top-notch and a powerful tool for manufacturers are the tons of benefits it offers. Some of those are compiled below:
Easy to Use and Deploy
It offers you flexible deployment options based on your infrastructure and budget. Whether you deploy it in a cloud or hybrid environment, it is simple to manage and gives your employees ease to access apps from Outlook, a web browser, or a mobile device.
Full-Integration with Microsoft Products
Dynamics 365 achieves full integration with Microsoft products (like Office 365 suite). It integrates with various apps, helping you reduce the time your employees have to spend transferring data from one application to another.
With this integration, you can easily move from D365 to Outlook, Power BI, or SharePoint as per you needs.
Reduced Sales Cycle
Dynamics 365 provides sales teams with a wealth of customer data insights whether they are taking a phone call in the office or working in the field. It enables your teams to manage workflow, craft quick responses, and deliver information on the go.
Additionally, when it provides you with a better understanding of each prospect’s journey, you can create customized selling experiences.
Optimum Customer Service Experience
Dynamics CRM collects comprehensive data on customers, analyzing the website they visit, how they interact with it, what interests they have, and a lot more.
Its Business Intelligence tool helps identify customer sentiments, brand loyalty, and buying patterns. Though these data points cannot be measured quantitatively, they are highly valuable for the sales process.
Having such insightful data at hand, your teams can interact with customers on a human level and offer personalized services.
Customizable
Dynamics 365 offers you a variety of built-in tools and modules to automate manufacturing workflows. In case these solutions do not fit your needs, it also gives you the flexibility to modify them to align with your needs.
In addition, it facilitates flexible architecture, custom pricing, and deployment options so you can customize the solution for your budget, KPIs, and team size.
Scalability
Since Dynamics Manufacturing is based on a monthly-basis subscription, you can easily scale it up or down depending on your current workload, team size, and budget.
What Are Some of the Best Microsoft Dynamics 365 Applications For Manufacturing?
Microsoft Dynamics offers a collection of cloud applications for manufacturers to handle a variety of business processes- from marketing to sales operations and accounting. Its applications go beyond being mere mobile apps and serve as modules for Dynamics software solutions.
Some of the best applications or modules Dynamics combines or integrates with are:
- Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations
Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations is closely modeled on Dynamics AX. It is a flagship ERP application of the Dynamics family, built for large organizations with more than 250 employees.
Being one of the most comprehensive solutions, this application delivers industry-focused tools for manufacturers to optimize their shop-floor processes. Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations includes lots of features to help your business revitalize operations across the enterprise.
Some of the tools this manufacturing module incorporates are:
- Master planning
- Product configuration
- Material and capacity planning
- Production control
- Inventory and resource management
- Multi-site warehouse management
- Distribution planning and quality management
- Job scheduling and sequencing
- Transportation management
- Direct and indirect procurement
- Vendor self-service portal
- Shop floor management
- Supplier relationship management
- Purchase requisitions
It comes with a subscription of $190/ user per month if you want to get a full license to use all these features. Besides this, you can also get the application combined with a variety of other ERP and CRM apps as a part of a wider plan.
- Dynamics 365 Business Central
It is a new cloud-based ERP application that is closely modeled on Dynamics NAV.
Dynamics 365 Business Central combines all the features that small to mid-sized manufacturing businesses need to streamline their back-end processes.
This solution comes in two editions- Essential and Premium. The cost of Essential is $70/ user per month and the features it offers are:
- Purchasing and invoicing
- Budgets and finance
- Purchasing order management
- Fixed assets
- Contact management
- Workflow
- Opportunity management
- Resource management
- Advanced inventory and simple inventory
- Distribution
Access to other modules of Business Central such as manufacturing and service management comes with purchasing a Premium license which costs $100/ user per month. The Premium license gives access to features such as:
- Version management
- Production orders
- Demand forecasting
- Capacity planning
- Basic supply planning
- Agile manufacturing
- Finite loading
- Machine centers
- Microsoft Dynamics® GP
Dynamics GP is a software solution by Microsoft for businesses to manage core processes like business intelligence and reporting, field service management, financial management, procurement, inventory, and supply chain management.
Microsoft Dynamics GP is an inclusive enterprise resource planning solution designed for small and mid-sized organizations.
Many growing companies in the healthcare and educational institutes, retail business, eCommerce, construction, wholesale business, and other manufacturing spheres prefer to use Microsoft Dynamics GP.
Here are the reasons why these industries opt for this software solution by Microsoft:
- With an integrated communication tool, GP allows teams to collaborate instantly.
- It contains automated features for workflows as well as in-built decision trees.
- It also allows invoice consolidation of multiple invoices together.
- Companies can run status reports of assets with accumulated depreciation values and netbook value.
- GP has a document attachment feature that adds relevant files to bills, allowing you share transactional context.
How Folio3 ( A Microsoft Dynamics Gold Partner) Provides The Best Dynamics 365 services For Manufacturing?
If you are all set to streamline your manufacturing processes and achieve workflow efficiency, you must be convinced that Dynamics 365 is the right solution for you.
However, before you begin implementation, you need to consider that adding a new platform to existing infrastructure is tricky. You may not be able to do it without a backup or expert consultation.
So, as a certified Gold Partner of Microsoft Dynamics, Folio3 covers your needs for the resources you require to adopt the new solution without a hitch.
Whether it is configuring the system, setting it up, or automating workflow, we will help your organization confidently leverage Dynamics 365 to become more productive and improve business relationships.
We have been working extensively for over 15 years with the Microsoft product line providing the services for Microsoft Dynamics 365 (including ERP and CRM modules) and other solutions. We provide businesses (like you) with our specialized division known as Folio3 Dynamics that extends expertise in a broad spectrum around Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions.
When you opt for us, here’s how we help you dig the industry deeper and establish you as a leading business in the manufacturing industry:
- Keep you abreast of the trends of your industry
- Offer solutions that integrate with both on-premise and cloud-based systems- whichever you choose to deploy
- Support each step of the process- be it configuration or customization
- Provide you tech solutions that perfectly fit your needs
- Help you integrate Power BI with PowerApps so that you turn insights into data-driven actions
- Our certified expert teams help you with the smooth migration of data from your old system to the new one.
- Being a certified Microsoft application developer, our firm develops applications that tie to your needs. These apps include the Retail Management App, Workflow Approvals App, Expenses App, and more.
We help you implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 and its CRM and ERP modules to provide your manufacturing business with the core functionality that escalates its efficiency.
We are one of the world’s leading tech solutions providers, and we help you gain better business value, transforming the way you do business.
To Sum Up
Tackling the growing shifts and turmoils of a competitive market is a challenge for manufacturing businesses. However, you can address these pressing challenges with Microsoft Dynamics 365 which offers you robust business applications and industry-focused add-ons that integrate all your manufacturing operations. They make it feasible for you to scale up or down anytime, putting you on top of your game.
While Microsoft Dynamics 365 is there to streamline your enterprise-wide processes and improve your customer relationships, Folio3 helps you unlock its optimized features and supports you throughout the journey with trusted customer services across the board.
Are you ready to become a leader in your industry?
We will create the pathway for you. All you need to do is sign up for a free live demo.
